White House Orders NASA to Destroy Important Satellite
futurism.com
futurism.com
The equivalent would be a democrat administration using government force to shut down data collection they don’t like because it will be used to promote policies they don’t want. Kind of like how the Biden admin’s FAA restricted drone use at the southern border during the migrant crisis.
I think the word you’re looking for is “like” instead of “equivalent”.
How are they not equivalent?
Also, note that the yearly maintainance cost is in the same order of magnitude as a single presidential golf trip. TBC, I'm not against presidential leisure, everyone needs a break sometimes - but the cost argument doesn't hold up.
Additionally, the migrant crisis is specific to current American political environment. Climate change is an issue which threatens humanity, and even if one is purely self-interested and doesn't care for famines in the third world, will directly cost the taxpayer trillions of dollars of the next century via extreme weather events and relocation/insurance bailouts, and indirectly cost hundreds of billions more via stunted productivity.
Restricting drone use for petty political reasons is not equivalent to pro-actively de-orbiting functional satellites that are working to mitigate existential risk.
Realistically, because it is owned by the government, it’s worth exactly what the government says it is. Just ask the Biden administration who sold materials for the border wall far below cost.
How does this satellite mitigate existential risk? We already know carbon dioxide contributes to climate change. We should spend money on reducing it, not on costly projects that tell us things we already know.
Speaking of existential risk, the US national debt is a far more urgent and certain risk than climate change. At least decommissioning this satellite helps on that front. How much carbon gets removed from the atmosphere if we keep it operational?
True. But the fact that it was actively generating valuable data does.
> Would a buyer pay $15M a year for the data produced by this satellite? Maybe, but the fact that the government put it into orbit and not a private company is telling.
Not really. One of of the first things you learn in an economics class is the notion of a "public good": goods which are provided by the government that increase the wellbeing of society, but for which no individual actor in society is incentivized to create or maintain. Street lights and interstate road networks are the prototypical examples, the original GPS constellation might be another candidate.
> Realistically, because it is owned by the government, it’s worth exactly what the government says it is.
EDIT: My original response to this point was weak, the revision is: certain subsets of the government (like NASA) consider it valuable. Other subsets of the government are seeking to destroy it because they don't like the data it produces. The latter subset does not consist of scientists, and has an active political interest in suppressing that information. I think that the former subset of the government is more capable of an accurate value assessment in this context.
> Just ask the Biden administration who sold materials for the border wall far below cost.
I do not have access to Biden admin officials and have no idea what you're talking about so I'll take your word for it.
> How does this satellite mitigate existential risk? We already know carbon dioxide contributes to climate change. We should spend money on reducing it, not on costly projects that tell us things we already know.
Here's the wiki link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiting_Carbon_Observatory_2
Understanding a threat is a necessary precursor to defeating it. In a concrete sense, this data is necessary for models that facilitate prediction of effects that inform policy decisions we make. Metaphorically, if you're in a forest and you know that a grizzly bear is out to get you, knowing the direction of and arrival time of the bear useful information. Except that doesn't do it justice, because in this metaphor, we've already constructed a lookout tower, and you're taking the position that burning down the lookout tower will save us the effort of having to climb the ladder, and we already know a bear is coming for us anyways so who cares?
> Speaking of existential risk, the US national debt is a far more urgent and certain risk than climate change. At least decommissioning this satellite helps on that front.
I agree that the national debt is a serious issue, but I already addressed the cost point in a previous comment.
> How much carbon gets removed from the atmosphere if we keep it operational?
Directly? None. Indirectly? Speculative. Whether it directly removes carbon is different than whether it provides insight which allow us to more efficiently and effectively deal with the risk by predicting how it will materialize, which is objective anyways. Historically, a strategy of "we're going to destroy assets that provide valuable information because we don't like the reality they present" has never worked out.
We don’t need a satellite that tells us there is increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is warming the globe with extreme accuracy. We need to do something about it.
You are making the mistaken assumption that more data collection directly leads to less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The steps that need to be taken to reduce it are the same whether or not you can measure atmospheric carbon dioxide with extreme accuracy or not.
The morbidly obese person can lose weight without even taking measurements. The results will be obvious if they’re doing it right. The same is true with climate change. You’ll see fewer droughts, less hurricanes, wildfires, etc.
To use your analogy, you would rather sit in your watchtower and keep tally of exactly how many bear teeth pierced the skin of victims on the ground instead of climbing down from the tower and shooting the bear.
Yes totally stopped gathering data.
That's not something I've seen actually proven tbh.
That’s not something I’ve seen actually proven, either.
But don’t take my word for it though. From the article itself:
“We can only speculate as to why the Trump administration wants to end the missions.”
Stop being a pedant. You and I both know why Biden restricted those drone flights and why Trump wants this satellite destroyed.
Think about all the carbon you could sequester with $15M a year. You could lease thousands of acres of farmland in the Midwest, plant trees, and sequester thousands of tons of carbon for that amount of money.
But no, we must keep spending money on projects like this to keep the climate hysteria at a maximum. It’s hard to produce headlines like “Atmospheric Carbon Rises to a New High Under Trump administration” without this satellite, you know.
Remind me, who has ulterior motives or terrible judgement?
But I thought it was good for plants? You appear to have some cognitive dissonance at play.
Use your brain. If farmers actually found this data valuable, the author of that article would have found someone who was using it and interviewed them.
That they did not tells you all you need to know.
It’s entirely rational to think such an expense is unnecessary, especially if your politics inclines you to believe the data collected by these programs will be used to push for more stringent environmental regulation that you dislike.
Even granting that the data is valuable, is it worth $15M per year? Can it be collected privately? Why does the government need to fund it?
To answer your question, yes, people can defend this action rationally. You don’t even have to be MAGA to do it. We should all want more efficient government.
Destroying it is insane, inexcusable Stalin-esque behavior.
This is a satellite you probably never heard about before but you were moved by an overemotional headline that a journo used to manipulate your pretenses.
And do they have the same coverage as a satellite?
Also, why do we need weather satellites when ground wx stations work perfectly fine?
https://www.co2.earth/22-co2-now/121-mauna-loa-co2
For list of stations besides Mauna Loa: https://gml.noaa.gov/dv/site/
"In coordination with the requested terminations for Weather Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes (see OAR-10) and Ocean Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes (see OAR-19), NOAA will close...Mauna Loa"
https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-count...
They are installing more solar than the rest of the world combined, other renewables as well. China doesn't have oil, they don't want to depend on oil or fossil fuels, and the CCP needs to keep some kind of social cohesion by showing off to their citizens that "things are being done".
Air quality over Chinese big cities has improved massively the past 10-15 years, they will only continue doing so, it was popular.
> https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-count...
Well, well, well: https://www.worldometers.info/oil/oil-consumption-by-country...
You probably have never visited China to be able to compare how it was in the 2010s to now, right?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenho...
China doesn't care about climate change. As you mentioned, they don't have oil, so they're simply exploiting the resources they do have to generate energy in all forms: solar AND coal AND nuclear AND whatever else they can get. This is rational from a purely economic standpoint, not from a standpoint of believing that climate change is an existential crisis.
https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/
I don't need to visit China to understand the data. They rank 168th in air quality, absolutely rock bottom tier:
It's expected that China is going to plateau in emissions soon: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gdd6jdm42o
Air quality is something China is actively working on and has had massive improvements: https://www.cfr.org/blog/chinas-battle-against-air-pollution...
And, measuring the emissions of China on its own is a pretty useless thing given they're the world's factory. A flattening of emissions increase is an absolutely huge deal.
Anyway, at least China has a government that isn't denying climate change and being ideologically hostile towards green energy. China is making real progress, America is walking backwards.
The first and second order derivatives are a lot more interesting here. Also, the impact they're having on the emissions of the global south.
They don't give a flying care about emissions they are strategically focused on economic expansion and power projection.
For example, for Google $15M is probably less than they spend on stocking their fridges with fizzy drinks. The PR benefits would be huge and they could probably sell the data to the current users of that info.
I think billionaires are a distraction. MAGA had no problem talking about "coastal liberals" with their billionaire connections and how they're going to "drain the swamp," and look where it led us.
The social contract, between the effective ruling and representative classes and the populations they are supposed to serve, seems to have been completely broken.
So you could say everything not pivoting to this point is basically a distraction.
By advocating for a perfect solution that sticks it to the bad guys, one can put off talking about concrete, actionable plans. Very convenient.
Their purpose is solely to protect the land/the lord from people with ideas such as yours following the collapse of the empire.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
The American Dream looks more and more like being a temperate, humid petrostate.
Thanks Marc, Peter, Elon, Jeff, Mark!
We're suffering from unusually poor governance, but it'll hardly be the first time.
America never dies, it just walks in circles aimlessly while others march ahead in a mostly straight line laughing at us.
As a society we need to stop asking for permission to fix potholes. Just go fix them and dare them to fine you for it which would be catnip for journalists to call more attention to the dysfunctional government.
NASA should crowdfund the weather satellites, with tax deductible donations, like right now. I would support them staying in the sky.